How Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights works
CloudWatch Application Insights provides monitoring of your application resources. The following information describes how Application Insights works.
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How Application Insights monitors applications
The following information describes how Application Insights monitors applications.
Application discovery and configuration
The first time an application is added to CloudWatch Application Insights it scans the application components to recommend key metrics, logs, and other data sources to monitor for your application. You can then configure your application based on these recommendations.
Data preprocessing
CloudWatch Application Insights continuously analyzes the data sources being monitored across the application resources to discover metric anomalies and log errors (observations).
Intelligent problem detection
The CloudWatch Application Insights engine detects problems in your application by correlating observations using classification algorithms and built-in rules. To assist in troubleshooting, it creates automated CloudWatch dashboards, which include contextual information about the problems.
Alert and action
When CloudWatch Application Insights detects a problem with your application, it generates CloudWatch Events to notify you of the problem. See Application Insights CloudWatch Events for detected problems for more information about how to set up these Events. Additionally, you can configure Amazon SNS notifications to receive alerts for detected problems.
Example scenario
You have an ASP .NET application that is backed by a SQL Server database. Suddenly, your database begins to malfunction because of high memory pressure. This leads to application performance degradation and possibly HTTP 500 errors in your web servers and load balancer.
With CloudWatch Application Insights and its intelligent analytics, you can identify the application layer that is causing the problem by checking the dynamically created dashboard that shows the related metrics and log file snippets. In this case, the problem might be at the SQL database layer.
Data retention
CloudWatch Application Insights retains problems for 55 days and observations for 60 days.
Quotas
For default quotas for CloudWatch Application Insights, see Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights endpoints and
quotas. Unless otherwise noted, each quota is per AWS Region. Contact
AWS Support
